Have your say on the cost of legal services regulation!

What is the cost of legal services regulation? How does regulation affect and impact lawyers, law firms and the profession? What is the true cost of the regulators (including the Legal Services Board)?

The Legal Services Board (LSB) today launches an online survey into the cost of regulation. This survey will gather lawyers’ views on the costs regulation imposes on them and their businesses, and will help identify unnecessary burdens that could potentially be removed.

To achieve this the LSB needs the legal profession itself to tell us what it thinks the costs of regulation are.

Legal Services Chairman, Sir Michael Pitt, said:

"We are calling on solicitors, barristers, chartered legal executives, licensed conveyancers, patent attorneys, trade mark attorneys, costs lawyers and notaries to get on board and help us identify the true cost of legal regulation.
This is an opportunity for you to have your say on a priority issue (namely deregulation) - an area in which we are increasingly cooperating with legal services regulators to deliver progress.
The success of this project depends on the participation of lawyers, firms and the profession as a whole. If there is engagement with this survey then we can wipe away all the anecdotes, conjecture and presumptions about costs and replace them with real facts and figures which could be crucial in prioritising areas for deregulation."

Lawyers, firms and the profession can make their voice heard on this crucial issue by responding to our cost of regulation survey which can be accessed here.

The survey will be open for six weeks finishing on Friday 28 November.

This survey is the first part investigation and seeks the views of the profession and law firms on costs. It will be followed in due course by an in-depth assessment which will seek to quantify the costs of complying with legal services regulation.

Background information on why we are undertaking this research can be found here.

This report is the first of three thematic reviews which the LSB said it would conduct in its 2014/15 business plan.

The Legal Services Act 2007 (the Act) created the LSB as a new regulator with responsibility for overseeing the regulation of legal services in England and Wales. The new regulatory regime became active on 1 January 2010.

The LSB oversees nine approved regulators, which in turn regulate individual legal practitioners. The approved regulators, designated under Part 1 of Schedule 4 of the 2007 Act, are the Law Society, the Bar Council, the Master of the Faculties, the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys, the Association of Costs Lawyers and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

In addition, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants are listed as approved regulators in relation only to reserved probate activities.

As at 1 April 2014, the legal profession comprised 138,243 solicitors, 326 alternative business structures, 15,279 barristers, 7,927 chartered legal executives and 5,404 other individuals operating in other areas of the legal profession such as conveyancing. The sector was valued at £29.2 billion in 2013 (total turnover).